| As a quite influential novelist in the contemporary literary realm, Li Rui has always existed in people's vision with a distinctive posture. His works like The Thick Soil, An Ancient Site, A Tree In The Calm, The Cloudless Sky, The Story of Yincheng have all caused great sensation in the contemporary literary world. But he is still new to most people and this is the inevitable fate of a writer with a unique probing spirit because he won't run after the so-called main stream literature, won't cater to and please the public, not to say to do something extraordinary on purpose, on the other hand, he always expresses his heartfelt experiences from what he feels and tries to realize his artistic dream through his unceasing hard explorations.Li Rui's creation of his fictions has always centered around the proposition that "to question the universal dilemma of human beings from the perspective of an individual", which from the beginning has been the core of his fiction creation. This proposition generalizes Li Rui's basic principle, his value systems, his ultimate meaning and narrative strategy in the creation of his fictions quite concisely. This dissertation is constructed with this proposition as its core, it strives to reveal the characteristics of contemporary literature and the literature in the 20th century through a multi-layer and multi-perspective analysis of Li Rui's novels.This dissertation has four chapters.The first chapter generalizes Li Rui's basic principle and value system in his novel writing, which serves as the foundation of this dissertation and aims to reach the fundamental characters of Li Rui's writings, which in this dissertation is summarized into three parts: the "human" centered expression, the claiming and protection of the value of the individuals, and the writing with "locality" as its standing point. In the "human" centered expression Li Rui strives to reflect the natural instincts of humans and this is what has been absent in the Chinese main stream literature of the 20th century. But in Li Rui's novels he does not only elaborate on the biological instinctsof human being, on the contrary, his novels are elevated writings, which allows his elevation does not just hover upon the shallow instincts of human being but shows a spiritual and philosophical aroma compared with the "root searching" novels, the new realist novels and the desire writing in the 90's. The description of "human" cannot be separated from the focus of individual lives. Li Rui's novels distinctively show the defending of the value of individual lives, which is represented concretely in the following three aspects: the glowing of individual lives in the natural existence, the defending of individual lives in the history of the society and the camivalization of individual lives amid the turmoil of hetero-voices. Li Rui's representation of "human" and " the individual lives" is not a shallow one but one that is rooted deeply in the land of China, and this constitutes Li Rui's position of "local China". As regards Li Rui's creation of his works, "locality" refers to the process of Chinese literature's turning toward modernity", during which both "tradition" and "the Occident" participate in the turn as the other in the local sense of time and space, and causes a two-way torturing experience, which is also Li Rui's core experience with regard to locality. Based on this foundation, Li Rui ponders on the turning of the Chinese literature toward modernity in the 20th century, shown in his questioning of the modernity of history and his focus on the ordinary people's world. In addition, Li Rui's position of "local China" is also reflected in his reflection on the modern Chinese language. He emphasizes that returning to the sea of oral language is an important way to construct the subjectivity and the self-awareness of the style.The second chapter discusses Li Rui's responses to the discourse context of the 20th century, which is reflected in his pondering of the issues of "history", "enlightenment" and "revolution". The retreating to the depth of history provides a platform for the "human", "the individual life" and "local China" in his novels to play, which not only makes his work rich and deep in the varying time and space, but also enables the possibility of his fiction to probe from a shallow level to a deeper one. The literary representation of history first involves an attitude toward history. Different form the traditional attitude toward history, Li Rui has his unique understanding of history. Under the theoretical support of the textualization of history and thehistorilization of the text, his novels reflect his distinctive interpretation of history. With this interpretation, Li Rui's novels clearly show a difference from the novels with history as its subject matter in the past. This difference is shown in three aspects: the negation of the simplified description of history in the official history, the questioning of historical evolution and the introspection of the inevitability of history. Since Li Rui's novels have the 20* history as their focus, enlightenment and revolution thus become two unavoidable issues in his work. As regards the issue of enlightenment, Li Rui first shows his distinctive position of enlightening, which is represented in his criticism of the awareness of the servant, the awareness of the onlooker and the awareness of sticking to one's hometown in the traditional national culture. But what is significant is that behind the enlightening voices there also exists a loud questioning voice. Voices of fast holding and questioning coexist in one text, which makes a dual phonic dialogue which deconstructs and restrains each other. This complicated contradiction in the issue of enlightenment reflects the natural anxiousness of the intellectual enlighteners in the 20th century, including Li Rui. The reason why this anxiousness can exist continuously within the 20th century is closely related to the cultural context of enlightenment in the 20th century, the spiritual characteristics of the enlightened and the contradiction between the enlightening attitude of the enlighteners and the attitude of the public. In the understanding of "revolution", Li Rui first discovers inevitable violence hidden under the object of revolution and history as well as the destruction brought to individual lives by this violence. Besides, his novels also sharply criticizes a kind of alienated revolution whose quality has changed, which is shown in the damaging of people's spiritual world and the tremendous destruction of the society brought by the negative factors of the public during the revolution. In fact, however, "revolution" of the 20th century has been severely misread in China. The specific national crisis in the last century has left in people's mind a carnivalistic collective memory aroused from the national tradition and makes the constructive factors in the "revolution" of the west are filtered deliberately and brings a continual destructive motivation for the Chinese politics and society in the 20th century.Third chapter discusses the direction of ultimate values in the creation of Li Rui's novels. Li Rui's novels not only express his personal response toward the integral discourse context in the 20th century but also realize a substantial elevation from the reachable realistic level by probing deeper, which makes his novels reach aphilosophical level-------the questioning of existence, the questioning of thepredicament of human existence. From the response to the concrete discourse context to a poetical elevation a certain transitional process is needed, which means that an elevating quality media is requested of the text to realize this. From the perspective of Li Rui's novels, the key to realize the author's ultimate object lies in the poetical character and the allegorical tendency of the novels. The questioning of human predicament in Li Rui's novels is focused in two aspects: torture and death, predestination and absurdity. Torture fills the texts of Li Rui's novels, which is not only caused by human predicament in "food" and "sex", but factors like history, culture and politics all have brought people severe suffering. The extreme state of suffering is death. There are two types of death in Li Rui's works, one is the compelled death caused by the unpredictable events, the other is chosen death from the free will of a person, both of which reflect the pain and despair in the predicament of human existence. Unavoidable predestination is another human predicament questioned by Li Rui, which in his novels is either shown in life tragedy caused by the defects in characters of the self or by history, society and the environment. Though some people are not willing to be at the mercy of fate fight against it, but it cannot really cover the sense of futility and void of the characters caused by their fate. The gigantic difference between the rational and irrational world causes the emergence of absurdity. The description of absurdity in Li Rui's novels reflects his questioning of rationality. The fusing of his personal heartfelt experience into his work enables his novels to free from the restraints of country, nationality and region and are elevated into a "human" aesthetic level, which not only leads Li Rui's works to realize the exceeding of quality but also provide some experience for the creation of contemporary literature.The fourth chapter focus on the issue of "how to represent", which isinterpretated in the light of "form" and is made from the analysis of the narrative discourse, the narrative structure, and the narrative voices, but that doesn't mean that it is only an technical analysis of Li Rui's novels, but one that aims at "reaching the meaning of the work from the analysis of the form". In the analysis of narrative discourses, the dissertation mainly adopts Bahkin's theory of "social hetero-discourse" as well as Faulchlt's view on the power of discourse and divides the discourse system in Li Rui's novels into four layers. The first layer stands for the discourse group belonging to the orthodox official ideology. According to the manipulated objects, this discourse group can be further divided into material power discourse, sex power discourse and political power discourse. The second layer of discourse belongs to the lower public in the city of Lv Liang Shan and Yin Cheng. These people are either passive receivers of the discourse or have lost the power of discourse, or take others' discourse as their own, which finally leads to their loss of the power of discourse. The intellectuals are at the third layer of the discourse system. The characteristic of culture determines their embarrassing position between the power discourse group and the receiving group of the lower public. At the fourth layer is the discourse group which renders voices with no concrete meanings, such as the discourse of the deaf, the discourse of the donkey and the discourse of the ghost. According to the narrative structure, this dissertation generalizes the structure of Li Rui's novels into four types: the structure of a pendulum, which means that an event returns to the beginning state before it reaches the climax. This pattern repeats itself continuously. One structure at the center with other structures circle around it, which means that there exists a core character or event and all the other characters or events all circle around this core. The structure of an upside down order of time and space, which means that the time and space in the novel are in converted and chaotic orders Parallel structures means that different clues in the novel are in the parallel state and the development of individual stories don't really have direct connections. As for the narrative voice, this dissertation has its unique connotations, which means in a narrative text, with a certain view point as the foundation, the narrator chooses corresponding narrating strategies( narrative pattern or technique) in order to his idea.This dissertation uses Susan Lancer's theory of narrative voices as reference and categorizes the narrative voices in Li Rui's novels into the authorial voice, the personal voice and the communal voice. These three models not only represents a technical rule respectively and expresses one type of narrative awareness, they also provide the possibility of the making of different meanings in the novels.As one of the novelists who hold fast to the idea of pure literature, Li Rui's commitment to literature may be very strong but that does not mean his art has reached some unaccessable height or a perfect state. On the contrary, in the creation of his novels, he encounters predicament from time to time and this predicament always gets him involved in some contradictions hard to get rid of and causes him puzzled and embarrassed. Seen from the integral creation of Li Rui's novels, the chief reason for the predicament of his writing lies in the his experience as a school leaver, which greatly influences his life and is shown in two aspects: the unstable value judgment within the space of the country and the escape from the "revolutionary" identity, which weakens the power of introspection of his novels.
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